étienne balibar

Translated by Jam es Swenson

Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?

Introductory Note: The following paper was originally presented at a colloquium, “Normes
et structures,” at the Université de Rennes, March 22–24, 2001. The style of a conference
presentation has been preserved.

T
he paper I would like to present to you today represents a
simple attempt on my part to establish an order among a certain number
of texts. My working hypothesis will be that the notion of text occupies a
point in between those of work (œuvre) and statement (énoncé ). Both of
these possibilities—extension in the direction of totality and restriction
in the direction of the elementa ry—are implicated in the notion of text,
but no a priori suppositions are justified concerning either the unity of
works, classified by author or by groups of authors, or the univocality of
statements, subjected as they are to the inevitable process of dissemina-
tion through reading and appropriation. The perspective of assembly and
interpretation of texts corresponds to a practical, even professional goal
of mine, which forms the immediate background and condition of pos-
sibility of my participation in this colloquium. Having signed a contract

Copyright 2003 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14 :1

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 2 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

with an American publisher, I am now obliged to put together an anthol -

ogy of Postwar French Philosophy,1 roughly spanning the years from 1950
to 1980 (although these entirely conventiona l dates need to be relaxed
somewhat in order to bring to the fore both continuities and divergences,
as well as a few signif icant retrospective movements). The limits set by
the publisher for length are quite generous, but still restrictive enough
to force us to stick to the most essential texts. The fact that my associate
in this enterprise, John Rajchma n, is of a different nationality and has
different disciplinary training than I guarantees in some respects that
the selections chosen will not be overly narrow and one -sided. Still, we
cannot but impose simplifying protocols—contestable by definition—on
our description and “classifications.” The advantage we can hope to gain
from this sort of process is that it requires the clearest statement possible
of our hypotheses with respect to the crucial problems and tendencies of
French philosophy in the period under consideration (which should not
be confused with a survey of schools and debates).
In the end (and this is what motivates my presence here and
the proposal I gave the organizers of this colloquium to speak about this
subject), my principal hypothesis is that structuralism—and I will pres-
ently tr y to specify the meaning we should give to the word—will, as far as
philosophy is concerned, have been the decisive moment in French thought
during the second half of the twentieth centur y. If our hypothesis that it
was a decisive moment is justified, then there is ever y reason to believe
that the retrospective characterization that is now possible of fundamental
aspects, events, and statements particularly characteristic of structural-
ism is not in the least a final recapitulation, much less an obituar y. On
the contrary, what makes such a project meaningful is the prospect of
showing that the structuralist movement, multiple and incomplete by its
very nature, is still going on—although it may be in sites where and under
denominations that we cannot immediately recognize it. In a well-known
text entitled “How Do We Recognize Structuralism? ” published in 1973 in
François Châtelet’s collection Histoire de la philosophie, Gilles Deleuze
attempted to enumerate a number of marks or transversal criteria in the
writing of his contempora ries so as to formulate a diagnosis of a first turn -
ing point in the structuralist trajectory, indeed, to contribute to that turn.
My ow n modest intention here, following upon anot her cycle of broaden-
ing and transfor mation, is likewise to tr y to formulate a diagnosis, and
perhaps also to contribute to a renewed movement.

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 d i f f e r e n c e s 3

The considerations I am proposing center around the ques -

tion of structuralism’s contribution to a philosophical reformulation of
the question of the subject and subjectivity, but first, three preliminary
obser vations of a more general character are necessar y.
The first concerns precisely the idea of movement. It is well
know n that structuralism was not a school, nor did it ever risk becoming
one. It had no founder—not even Claude Lévi-Strauss—and consequently
neither scission nor dissidence. On the contrary, it was characterized from
the beginning by the encounter between questions or problematics, and
thus between different voices or styles of writing. This encounter gave rise
to publications that took the form of the “manifesto” (signed by Barthes,
Foucault, Lacan, Althusser), which clearly demonstrates what Deleuze
called the essentially polemical value of structuralism. But even more
often, it gave rise to denials, which I would read not only as a refusal of
the label “structuralist” but more importantly as a refusal of any idea of
univocality. It would seem that for those who agreed in their rejection of
certain motifs coming from metaphysics, anthropology, and the philosophy
of history—particularly in the form given them by transcendental philoso-
phy (that of a subjective constitution of experience caught between the
poles of a priori universality and the particularity of sensation)—nothi ng
was more urgent than to bring out what Foucault was to call the points of
heresy (Order 100), even before any paradigm or episteme had a chance to
be defined. It would further seem that structuralism’s commonplaces had
to be decentered in favor of a radical multiplicity of interpretations and
that, in the end, it was impossible to formulate the conditions for entering
the field of structural or structuralist discursivity without immediately
looking for the way out. The apparent agreement between structuralists
on the necessity of studying structures rather than histories, essences,
figures of consciousness, or experiences, or on the “primacy” of structure
with respect to subjectivity, life, and historicity, was only possible insofar
as the irreducibility of structures to a single epistemologic al model was
immediately and collectively posited. The agreement also concerns, that
is, the insufficiency of the reference to structure and structures (a term
both inherited and transfor med) to express the project whose necessity
it had designated.
But I would maintain precisely this paradox: it is because struc -
turalism is not a school but a divergent encounter, because it consists as
much and more in the testing of the limits of the categor y that gives it

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 4 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

its name as in the construction of its consistency, that it represented a

unique and unavoidable moment in which, during a particular era and in
a particular context, all philosophical “schools” or “orientations ” found
themselves implicated. This is true not only of movements that, through
some of their representatives, contributed to affirming or configuring its
problematic, but also of those that refused it but were obliged to transform
themselves by this very refusal. This is why, even more than a movement
or an encounter, we can say that structuralism was an adventure for con-
temporary philosophy: an adventure through which, as occasionally (but
relatively rarely) comes to pass, philosophical discourse underwent and
in turn engendered histor y in the field of thought in general. Philosophers
“went in” to structuralism as neo -Kantia ns, phenomenologist s, Hegelians
or Marxists, Nietzscheans or Bergsonians, positivists or logicians, and they
came back out with all these identities upset and their mutual compat-
ibilities and incompatibilities redistributed.
The second preliminary observation I want to formulate con-
cerns the status of philosophy and the way the structuralist adventure
called this status into question. I maintain that structuralism is a properly
philosophical movement and that this is where its importance lies. Ques-
tions of structure, the effectiv ity of structure, subjectivity as a structural
effect, and of course, the limits or aporias of structural definitions are
entirely philosophical questions—otherw ise this term would have no
meaning, at least in the period we are talking about. This did not prevent
structuralist questions, notions, and styles from giv ing rise, as much and
perhaps more than other circumstances, to diagnoses of the death of phi-
losophy (just as, closer to us, structuralism’s real or supposed eclipse has
been saluted on many sides as a renaissance of philosophy or of “true”
philosophy). More particularly, it did not prevent more than one protago -
nist of the structuralist adventure from calling himself, or being called by
others, a nonphilosopher (for example, a “scientist” [ savant ], particularly
in the field of the “human sciences,” but this was not the only option), even
an antiphilosopher. Indeed, I expect reactions of skepticism, refusal, or
condescension if I mention, for example, names such as Lévi-Strauss and
Jacques Lacan as philosophical representatives of structuralism.
The issue here is no doubt a general one, proper neither to our
period nor to the texts we are talking about. We know, moreover, that it
was the object of about-faces and polemics even within what I am call-
ing the structuralist movement. In order to establish straightaway a clear
thesis on this decisive point, upon which depends to a great extent our
diagnosis of the reasons that many philosophical currents today have for
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 d i f f e r e n c e s 5

distancing themselves from structuralism, I will say the follow ing. First
of all, structuralism situates itself in a general way within an orientation
that Georges Canguilhem used to characterize with a formula, almost a
slogan, that he claimed to have found in the work of Léon Brunschvicg:
“Philosophy is the discipline for which ever y foreign material is good, and
for which only foreign material is good” (33, translat ion modified). Which
means, if I understand it correctly, that what is important is the becoming-
philosophical of theoretic al or practical questions and not their position
as originally philosophical or as “internal” to a given philosophical field.
Next, and more important, at the point in time where we are grasping it, let
us say in France around 1960, structuralism is characterized, in a striking
unity of opposites that is highly unstable, by both a resolute affirmation of
the autonomy of the human sciences with respect to the set of preexisting
philosophical orientations or possible philosophical foundations and by an
uncomprom ising struggle against the traditiona l positivism of the human
sciences, whether it appears in the form of a methodologic al objectiv-
ism that claims to bracket the question of the genesis or intentional ity of
experimental protocols or rules of formalization, or in that of a preestab -
lished (and, in fact, metaphysical) distribution of “regions” of experience
or objectivity. This, moreover, is both what connects structuralism to (and
in the end, distinguishes it from) more or less contemporary movements
that it could be compared with, such as post-Diltheya n hermeneutics, or
Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, or the analysis of ordinar y lan-
guage. It is also what allows us to understand exactly what the structural-
ists were looking for among “precursors” such as Freud, Marx, Rousseau,
or even Aristotle. I would express this by saying that from a structuralist
point of view, the distinction between “philosophy” and “nonphilosophy”
has an essentia lly relative signif ication, or yet again, that what is impor-
tant for thought (for the philosophical activity, we might say, recalling
how Barthes once spoke of the structuralist activity) is always the task of
finding the nonphilosophical, or the limit, the nonphilosophical condition
of philosophy, and of managi ng, by means not only of a specific turn of
expression but also of an invention of categor ies, to bring about its rec-
ognition as someth ing new in and for philosophy. Structuralism presents
itself, in a particularly coherent and radical way, as a practice of immanent
externality (a “thought of the outside,” as Foucault put it) in opposition to
ref lexive, foundat ional, ontological , or apophantic styles of philosophy.
This sort of orientation is expressed in the return of theses that
are themselves philosophical, none of which is proper to structuralism
in a historical sense but which acquire a particularly urgent signif ica-
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 6 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

tion with regard to it, all the more so in that these theses are constantly
problematized, that is, the possibility of their employment and their rigor-
ous observation is continually questioned. I will give two examples. The
first, to which Lacan attached a particular importance, and for which
he forged the neologism lalangue, is that there is no metalanguage that
can be isolated as such, not only in an ultimate sense but even in a local
one (which recalls such different authors as G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig
Wittgenstein). 2 The other, for which Louis Althusser constantly sought a
justification even as he, in a sense, “practiced it on himself,” is the idea
that philosophy and “theory,” rather than being self-isolating discourses,
are as such (and not only in limit-cases) “inter ventions” whose end is to
disappear in the production of their own effects, and which thus have an
essentially “conjunctural” character (“Philosophy” 78). Applied to the
structuralist movement as a whole, this allows us to understand why it was
so concerned with systematicity (one of the least contestable connotations
of the idea of structure, and one of the reasons why inspiration was sought
in diverse practices of systemat ization, from axiomatics to biology by way
of linguistics), while at the same time it so regularly avoided formulati ng
systems, with much greater success than many other philosophical move-
ments. We should see this not as a failure but as an effect of coherence.
And we have to take it into account in our ref lection upon the singular
implications of structuralism as far as the temporality or historicity of
theoretical thought is concerned.
Finally, as a third preliminary point, I would like to pose the
question of what, in a sense, was particularly French about structuralism
and the structuralist movement. It is, of course, out of the question to claim
that structuralism was a national or nationalist philosophy that could be
attached to some “geophi losophical” specificity or unity. Structuralism
is highly universalist. It is, moreover, important to remember that, much
like the existentialist and phenomenologic al movements that preceded
it in France in the inter war period, and similar to literary surrealism,
which, in many respects, prepared its questions and objects of interest
as far as everything related to the articulation of the imagina ry and the
symbolic order (or disorder) is concerned, it was characterized by a lively
cosmopolitan reaction against the provincialism and traditionalism of the
French university system.
Still, it is impossible not to sketch out at least a triple complica-
tion beyond this remark. First of all, some of the developments of structural-
ism that we are speaking of here, in particular with respect to the question

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 d i f f e r e n c e s 7

of the subject, are, if not dependent upon, at least facilitated and suggested
by idiomatic properties of the French language or by linguistic derivations
that are given particular prominence in French (at least this is the impres-
sion after the fact). This is, in particular, the case for the concatenation of
significations of the “subject” (sujet), “subjection” (sujétion and assujetisse-
ment), “subjectivity” (subjectivité ), and “subjectivation” (subjectivation).
This does not mean that structuralist theorems are untranslatable, but
rather that they require (and did require, in their international diffusion,
which can hardly be called discreet) a labor of translation, inscribed in
the materiality of languages and every bit as incompatible with the idea of
the existence of an idiom that is philosophical “by nature” (or by destiny)
as with that of an idiomatic neutrality or indifference. 3
Next, it is fairly clear that the rise or crystallization of the struc -
turalist movement at the end of the 1950s, at first around ethnography and
psychoanalysis (the two disciplines that Foucault refers to in The Order
of Things as accomplishing an immanent critique of the perspective of
the “human sciences” and calling into question the empirico-transcen-
dental dualism proper to the constitution of “man” as both subject and
object of a set of knowledges), occurs within a context that demands a
detailed history, and which I would call the French episode of the question
of philosophical anthropology, follow ing upon the German episode of the
inter war period (around Cassirer, Scheler, Heidegger, and the successors
of Dilthey), whose themes it carried for ward in a certain way even while
remaining fairly independent of the contemporaneous American episode.
This articulation between the structuralist adventure and the problem
of philosophical anthropolog y—that is, not only the question of whether
there is a philosophy of man and of the human, but above all the question
of whether philosophy as such is a “thought of humanity” or of humanities
that distribute human existence by assigni ng it a variety of norms, or still
yet of the differential of humanity and inhumanity that “creates” man—
explains why the occasionally violent conflict between structuralism and
its designated or declared adversaries crystallized around the question
of humanism and antihumanism. It further explains why structuralism
itself, from one moment to the next and from one author to another, oscil-
lates between various possible negations of classical humanism, whether
of essence or existence, or between theoretical antihumanism and the
humanism of alterity or even the “othering” (altération) of the human
(which does not seem to me the same thing as what Levinas calls the
“humanism of the other man”).

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 8 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

Finally (but I will not have the time to explore such hypotheses
here), I would like to suggest brief ly that structuralism (and in this it was
not alone, but related by a compound of complementarity and antagonism
to the “French-style” phenomenology that descended from Merleau-Ponty
in particular, or to the Bergsonism or Biranism of certain contemporary
French philosophies of life) retrospectively contributed to the detaching
of certain founding works of classical philosophy written in French from
the interpretations that Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Husserlian and
Heideggerian phenomenology had given them, just as it posed, at least in
principle, an obstacle to the interpretations perpetuated by anglophone
cognitivism. I am thinking here in particular of Descartes and Rous -
seau.
All of this ought to allow us to make a few guesses about the
reasons for and the forms of the opposition and institutional resistance
that followed upon the apparent hegemony of structuralism in French
philosophy in the period between 1960 and 1980. The internal, properly
theoretical dimensions and conditions of what I began by calling the new
turn or aftereffect of structuralism today are much more interesting, from
my point of view, than its dependence upon the external environment.
But we must be consistent with our hypothesis of a philosophy that is
inseparable from its constitutive alterity or heterogeneit y (which in my
view has noth ing to do with reductionism). In its French figure (today a
classical one, studied more or less throughout the world), structuralism
is sociologically incompatible with the conditions for the institutionaliza-
tion and linguistic standardization of philosophical study to which such a
large part of the French university system has rallied (with all the more
haste in that it was behind the curve) or with the temptation to return to
an institutional philosophy of national -republican inspiration. However,
the conclusion I would draw (I almost said, whose symptoms I observe)
is not that the structuralist adventure is now without a future. Rather, it
is that structuralism, or poststructuralism if you prefer, is in the course
of emigrating elsewhere, where it demonstrates its vitality by combining
with other problematics. But that is a different history from the one we
wish to tell today.

Let us now come to the theme I annou nced at the beginning.

In truth, the question of the relation between the structuralist movement
and the problematic of the subject, as we can describe it across a certain

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 d i f f e r e n c e s 9

trajectory of texts (which, of course, are not all structuralist, or not so in

the same way, or which lead to the recognition of a fundamental unclas-
sifiability), is not the only one whose hypothet ical reconstruction can
serve as the ground for testing conjectures about the characteristics of
structuralism as a movement of both entrance into and exit from the laby-
rinths of structure (which for us were someth ing like what the labyrinths
of freedom and continuity were for the metaphysics of the classical age).
There are indeed other questions which cut across that of the subject:
examples might include the question of the enunciations of (or ways of
writing) truth, or the question of the nature of the event (and of practice)
as such. But the problematic of the subject has at least a methodological
priority, on account of what I am calling the tight links between the emer-
gence of structuralism and the inf lection of debates about philosophical
anthropolog y, to which structuralism contributed so heavily.
For the purposes of synthesis, we can suggest that structuralism
constituted itself, in a polemical way, or was attacked from the outset, in a
no less polemical way, as the challenging of a generative equation, whose
speculative abstraction makes possible a wide variety of developments in
which the humanity of man (understood in an essentialist way as a com-
mon form or eidos, in a generic way as a Gattungswesen [species -being],
or in an existentialist way as the construction of experience) is identified
with the subject (or subjectivity). Subjectivity in turn is conceptualized
within the teleological horizon of a coincidence or reconciliation between
individuality (whether particular or collective) and consciousness (or the
self-presence that effectively actualizes meanings). It should be noted that
such a coincidence or reconciliation does not need to be accomplished at
every moment, nor does it need to allow any exceptions, delays, or con-
tradictions that are not the counter part of its own division or separation.
Still, it seems that it must correspond to experiences of thought that allow
the subject to exist by itself and form in ideal terms an absolute horizon
of meaning, particularly as far as the knowledge, the transindividual and
transgenerational communication, and the historical normativity of truth
are concerned. In other words, if we situate ourselves on the ground of
enunciation, it must authorize the appropriation of an I (or an I say, I think, I
live) and its association with a We more or less immediately identified with
a humanity distinguished in a transcendental fashion from the “world” or
“nature” of which it is a material part.
If you will grant me, at least hypothet ically, this characteriza-
tion of the full humanist figure of the subject,4 I would like to advance

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 10 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

here, in a descriptive mode, two successive theses that seem to me to cor-

respond to the two moments of “structuralism” (or the two movements
that envelop one another within structuralism). In my view, the repeated
or renewed succession of these two moments is the only thing that gives
a full characterization of structuralism.
First, structuralism in fact destitutes such a subject in a radical
way by abolishing the presuppositions of autonomy or preestablished har-
mony that underpin its teleological function: the great classical “identities”
or “identifications” of the “ego” or “self ” who is or becomes “himself ” (or
“herself”), who is his or her “own self” (eigentlich), of the “I” that is a “We”
and the “We” that is an “I.” But this destitution 5 should not in any way be
confused with a negation of an apophantic type, in which the annihila-
tion, or inversion, of the predicates of individuation and belonging, or of
self-presence and consciousness, constitutes by itself the essential ity of
the subject, the truth of the name of the subject, the absence of determina-
tion or the horizon of absence in the determinations that guarantees the
irreducibility, the “originarité” of the subject in opposition to its substan-
tialized or reified appearances. But neither should it be confused with a
misrecognition of subjectivity or of the subject/object difference, which
is precisely the mistake that personalist and transcendental critiques
imputed to structuralism, whose slogan in a sense was the substitution
of the object (be it a formal, residual, or complex object) for the subject. I
believe that, in reality (and this is a new meaning that structuralism, in a
complex relation with the Copernican revolution and Nietzschean geneal-
ogy that we cannot discuss here today, has given to the word critique), the
typical movement of structuralism resides in a simultaneous operation of
deconstruction and reconstruction of the subject, or deconstruction of the
subject as arche (cause, principle, origin) and reconstruction of subjectiv-
ity as an effect, or in yet another formulation, a passage from constitut ive
to constituted subjectiv ity.
But this first, decisive, and spectacular movement is only mean-
ingfu l to the extent that it is overdetermined and rectified by a second
one, which seems to me to correspond to the alteration of subjectivity in
the various modalities of a denaturation, an excess, or a supplement (as
Derrida put it in Grammatology). In this second movement, which is oxy-
moronic and thus more intimately connected to the idea of a condition of
impossibility of experience (or of a condition of experience as “experience
of the impossible”) than to that of a transfor mation of cause into effect,
of the originar y into facticity, etc., subjectivity is formed or named as the

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 d i f f e r e n c e s 11

proximity to a limit whose crossing is always already required even as it

remains in some sense unrepresentable.
This second movement is more commonly considered as “post-
structuralist” than as structuralist to the extent that one can call structure,
in a generic way, the operator of the production of subjectivity as such,
or of the effect of subjectivity as self-recognition and distanciation with
respect to the object, whatever the terms used to describe it and whatever
may be the form or formalism applicable in a given field of experience that
allows a constitutive function to be reversed into a constituted function. It
would seem, on the other hand, that in the emergence of the unrepresent-
able considered as the subject’s vanishing point, or in the “performat ive
contradiction” of an injunction without any possible execution (whether it
be an injunction to transgress, disappear, identify, or metamor phose), we
are dealing with the dissolution of structure—whether it be to the advan-
tage of f lux, dissemination, the machine, or the thing. But my hypothesis
is precisely that there is, in fact, no such thing as poststructuralism, or
rather that poststructuralism (which acquired this name in the course
of its international “exportation,” “reception,” or “translation”) is always
still structuralism, and structuralism in its strongest sense is already
poststructuralism. All the “great” texts that can be attached to the name
of structuralism in fact contain both these movements, even if we must
admit differences of accent between the two. The tendency is for structur-
alists to move from one gestu re to the other—one is tempted to say, from a
“structuralism of structures,” that is, one that seeks to discover structures
and invariants, to a structuralism “without structures,” that is, one that
seeks their indeterminacy or immanent negation.
I willingly admit that each of these movements can only be
described in a circular way, in the form of a petitio principii. This means
that for the purposes of this interpretation, I am calling “structure,” in the
sense of structuralism, a mechanism of reversal of the constituting subject
into constituted subjectivity, based on a deconstruction of the “humanist”
equation of the subject. And I am calling “poststructuralism,” or structur -
alism beyond its own explanatory constitution, a moment of reinscription
of the limit on the basis of its own unpresentability. But as a counterpart, I
ask that you admit—against an obstinate thesis—that the question of the
subject has never ceased accompanying structuralism and determining
its orientation. And in reality I am not far from thinking that structural-
ism is one of the few philosophical movements to have tried not only to
name the subject, assign it a founding function, or situate it but, properly

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 12 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

speaking, to conceptualize it (which may simply mean to conceptualize

the preceding “operations” as operations).

Let us now try to illustrate a bit more precisely each of these

two moments, which we have evoked in terms that are, we must admit,
rather abstract.6 For the first moment—deconstruction and reconstruc-
tion, passage from the constitutive to the constituted—I will give three
privileged examples among many other possibilities. Their succession
constitutes both a deepening of the question of the effect of subjectivity
and a progressive displacement from a formal conception of structure to
an increasingly material one. I can obviously only refer to them in a very
allusive way to indicate the use I make of them, presuming that my lis-
teners are familiar with or will be able to find the appropriate contexts,
which are quite classical.
I borrow my first example from Émile Benveniste, whose themes
of “man in language” or “subjectivity in language” practically designate
by their very names the process of reversal of the constitutive and the
constituted. Not only because language “speaks man” rather than “man
speaking language” or languages (as several of the Romantics had already
put forth), but because language “speaks” man precisely as a subject, or
rather, speaks the possibility and the limit of possibilities for man—for the
human individual thrown into the linguistic system—to name himself as
subject. I am not seeking here to say whether the thesis put for ward in
Problems in General Linguistics is “true” or not from the point of view of
linguistics, but to discover its meaning. What is important is the way Ben-
veniste combines his distinction between statement (énoncé ) and enuncia-
tion 7 (comparable to that between code and message in Jakobson) with a
critical reformulation of the classification of personal pronouns, which I
would interpret in the following way: It is well known that for Benveniste,
at least in the Indo -European languages (or in their dominant usages), the
pronouns classed as “personal” can, in fact, be divided into two classes,
those of the first and second persons being the only “true” ones, where the
enunciation is implied in the statement itself, and which are capable of
exchanging places in a process of interlocution , whereas the third person
represents an “invariant” that excludes the subject and moves between the
singula r and plural in the same way a common noun does. Subjectivity is
thus characterized by a two -fold regime of opposition: on one hand, the
opposition internal to persons, which institutes the exchange of individual

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 d i f f e r e n c e s 13

places but excludes the interchangeability of consciousnesses (I/You); on

the other, the opposition instituted by the different forms of the plural,
which implies that for the individual subject I, sometimes the We installs
within his consciousness a virtual representation of the whole of which
he is an “indivisible part,” as Rousseau said (50), someti mes the exclusive
They creates a possibility of alienation that precipitates the community
into the world of things and consequently, the subject into skepticism or
unhappy consciousness.
I will take my second example from Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The
Purloined Letter’” and “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic
of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” that is, the first and last texts of
the Écrits (1966). In analyses that we all remember, Vincent Descombes
showed just how much these texts owe to Alexandre Kojève’s reading of
Hegel and thus to an anthropologica l interpretation of the dialectic that
binds together recognition and the struggle to death around the infinity
of a desire in which the subject can do nothi ng but pursue the lure of a
forever lost completeness. But I would like to insist upon another aspect,
which concerns, rather, the doubling of the subject between the instance
of the symbolic and that of the imaginary. The famous formula casting the
subject as “what a signif ier represents for another signifier,” 8 and thus as
what is indefinitely transmitted or transferred from one bearer to another,
follow ing the insistence or incidence of an absolutely impersonal, even
aleator y chain, does not deprive the subject of existence. Rather, it calls
upon the subject to recognize itself in the ref lection of the “identifica-
tions” that it constructs by interpreting the desire of the Other (which
can also be a tragic absence of desire), projected behind the signifying
chain or imagined as its origin, and by making of itself the “object” of
this desire through the labor of fantasy. The reversal from constitutive to
constituted is all the more interesting here in that Lacan’s terminolog y,
superimposing the specifically French duality between two designations
for the subject, the Je and the Moi, on Freud’s instances (Ich, Es), refers
not only to Pascalian and thus Cartesian sources but also to a tw isting of
the Kantia n paralogism of pure reason, in which the subject can project
himself into all the places of an “object” (or a “phenomenon”), provided
they are invested with a minimal representation of desire.
T hird example : Lévi- Strauss. Not so much works such as
Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, The Elementary Structures of
Kinship, and Structural Anthropology (even though there would be much
to draw from these texts), where the “subject” is essential ly defined as a

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 14 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

place, that is, by what it receives or, better, by the way in which a certain
empty place, the defining condition of any combinator y or invariance, can
be overdetermined in both an order of language and an order of exchange
or reciprocity between “halves” of the social whole. Although both of these
orders can be rigorously determined, their superimposition appears as
a pure contingency.9 I am thinking, rather, of a later Lévi-Strauss, still
little know n by philosophers, who has recently been the object of a very
illuminating commentary by Patrice Maniglier: the Lévi-Strauss that can
be seen, for example, in The Naked Man, whose conclusion fulfills the
task announced in The Savage Mind. What is “constituted” here (even
constituted as constitutive), is

thought itself, the constitutive experience of which is not that

of an opposition between the self and the other, but of the other
apprehended as opposition. In the absence of this intrinsic prop-
erty—the only one, it is true to say, that is absolutely given—no
act of consciousness constitutive of the self would be possible.
Being, were it not apprehensible as a relationship, would be
equivalent to nothingness. The conditions which allow the emer-
gence of myth are therefore the same as those of all thought, since
thought itself cannot be other than thought about an object, and
since an object, however starkly and simply it is conceived, is
an object only in so far as it constitutes the subject as subject,
and consciousness itself as consciousness of a relationship, [on
the basis of an] initial opposition [. . .] injected into experience.
( Naked 603–04)

Thus, the structure is no longer considered as a whole, it is no longer

properly speaking a combinatory (these two things being, in truth, insepa-
rable). Structure is, rather, a process of displacement, indefinitely enlarged
and varied across the surface of the earth, of oppositional couples that,
inserted in so many stories that echo one anot her, make nature into the
paradigm of culture, the concrete alterity into which men project their
own relations and their singula rity.
However brief these examples may be, we can see two les -
sons emerge from them. First, the structure that structuralist discourses
speak of, make use of, or constitute is never a first- degree structure
(what Bachelard used to call “first” as opposed to “second -position” [9]),
a tota lity or system of parts submitted to a law of discreteness, difference,
or variation and invariance. It is always a “second -position” structure,

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 d i f f e r e n c e s 15

that is, a use of such logical and analogical forms in the second degree,
in such a way as to put into place a difference of differences, which can
be called the “subject” and which determines our perspective on the
system. In this sense, all structuralism is profoundly Leibnizian. Second,
the primordial operation of structuralism is always already political and
politically subversive. It is not by accident that I evoked above, in more or
less Hegelian terms (but they could just as easily have been Rousseau ist,
Kantian, or Durkheimian terms) the fundamental possibility, inscribed in
the subject’s constitutive function, of creating an identity between I and
We (recalling the key phrase in Hegel’s Phenomenolog y of Mind : “‘I’ that
is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” [Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist] [110]), be it
in the teleologica l form of a transcendental presupposition or a practical
destination. But the structuralists with their structures are always already
creating an obstacle between me and us, that is, between “self” and “self,”
the other of the subject that constitutes it. They thus virtually make the
community into an indefinitely open (or reopened) problem, and not a
given or a possible resolution.

This, in fact, already has brought us to what I called the second

movement, the poststructuralism inherent within structuralism, without
which there would in fact be no structuralism or structures constitut ive
of effects of constituted or derived subjectivity. For what are we talking
about when we say that the subject cannot be constituted without a division
and above all without being separated from itself by the signif ier, form of
enunciation, or variation whose trace it is? It is not another subject, the
double of the subject itself, nor is it an object in the sense of a constituted
objectivity or phenomenality, even though it is in a sense both more and
less. Above, I borrowed Derrida’s terminology to speak of a supplement
or excess. Other terminologies would be equally possible, and there is no
question of demanding any kind of unanimity, either in terminology, style,
or method. If “structuralisms” are fundamentally heretical with respect
to one another, what can we say of “poststructuralisms,” which include
discourses and texts, some of whose authors never figured among struc-
turalists and which interest us for a retroactive effect on structure that
we believe their confrontation can produce?
One last preliminar y remark: if there is a thematic that we
could describe as poststructuralism’s element of critique with respect to
structuralism, I believe it would be that of a critique of the norm and of

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 16 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

normativity, not to the benefit of objectivity and factual ity, but with a view
toward the transmutation of values that depends in the first place upon
the recognition of the way they have been dissimulated as essences, foun -
dations, or facts. In this sense, all poststructuralism is profoundly Nietzs-
chean. I indeed think that this is the common element in ever y critique
of structure as a “determinism,” as well as of identification of entities, in
the sense of a “relational ontology ”—as homogeneous or self- subsisting
“systems,” and in this sense as realized images of noncontrad iction. This
is also the horizon of what Foucault calls “power,” or “power-knowledge”
(“Truth”). Once again we are dealing with a politics, or a metapolitics.
But, this being said, we are also in full dispersion.
Let us return to Lévi-Strauss for an example. A little text, this
time, but one that has had a great effect and that communicates with a
whole current of contemporary anthropology: the twelfth chapter of The
View from Afar, “Cosmopolit anism and Schizophrenia.” The issue is still
one of thought, but it is no longer approached in terms of a structure of
oppositions. Rather, there is a structure of differences between two modes
of organizing content into “systems of thought”: myth and delirium.
Lévi-Strauss, who does not believe in the extreme relativist variants of
ethnopsychiatry, tells us that there remains an insurmountable differ-
ence between the two, but he also shows us that this difference does not
have a nature proper to it. The difference between the normal and the
pathological varies effectively between cultures, and in this respect they
are condemned to reciprocal misunderstanding, or at least uncertainty.
Elsewhere the same demonstration has been conducted with respect to
masculinity and femin inity. At issue generally are what I call anthropo-
logical differences, which always are, or can at least become, the occasion
for a subjection but are uneasy in that, if their existence is inseparable
from our representation of the human (and without representation of the
human there is no humanity—“humanity is its representation”), the site
or point of their difference remains unrepresentable (except in the exhi-
bition of fetishes).
But here is yet anot her theoretical situat ion: “subject” and
“subjection.” It is time to go back over it, however brief ly. This whole
historical “play on words” comes from Roman law, passing through Rous -
seau, Nietzsche, and Bataille, but it has become the most striking common
stylistic or rhetorical characteristic of all French philosophy that seeks to
find the effects of power at the heart of structures or, better put, to pursue
the stumbling block that can be interpreted as resistance. We can see here

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 d i f f e r e n c e s 17

that no one has taken more seriously than the structuralists themselves
the reproach that was initially made to them, namely that they reduced the
subject to structure in order to plunge it into slavery. We know how this
works: no subject without subjection, at least in the first, plastic sense of
the word (just as Derrida calls propriation the process that contains both
appropriation and expropriation as moments [ Spurs 109–17]). But what is
the subjection of the subject? A differentia l of subordination (assujetisse-
ment) and subjectivation, that is, of passivity and activity, perhaps of life
and death, or metamorphosis and destruction. We have no unequivocal
formula that allows us to conceptualize it, still fewer criteria that allow
us to mark its turning point, which can appear in the form of extreme
violence, or the appearance of what Lacan, follow ing Freud, calls “the
Thing” (das Ding [ Seminar VII ]), deindividualized and desubjectified,
taking the place of the objects to which the will and desire of the subject
are attached. We do, nonet heless, have examples of its hallucinatory pres-
ence, or its over-presence (which is no longer a self -presence), in the “real”
of individual or collective experience—that of jouissance or terror.
In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler adds a supplemen-
tary logic to her remarkable analysis of this radically aporetic dialectic
of “subjection” as a differential of subordination (assujetissement) and
subjectivation without symmet ry or reversal, a paradox she calls, a bit
mischievously, the discursive turn (or return), which is both situated on
the scene of subjectivation and constitutive of this scene. All structural-
ists lend themselves to it precisely to the extent that they reject the facili-
ties of metalanguage. But it was Louis Althusser, in his essay “Ideolog y
and Ideological State Apparatuses,” who gave it what we can call its pure
form: there is no “subject” who does not name him- or herself, or rather,
whom theor y does not stage as naming him- or herself and thus becoming
a subject and being subjected in the moment and gestu re of emergence
from what is not yet a subject (a “pre-subject”: in Althusser’s terminolog y,
the individual) and thereby becomes always already the subject. There
is no structural constitution of the subject that is not, if not an image and
resemblance of the Creator like the metaphysical subject, at least the per-
formance or ironic enactment of a linguistic causa sui. Previously, if only
to remark its aporia, I called this the presentation or reinscription of the
limit on the basis of its ow n unpresentability : unassignable difference,
violence, or radical passivity, and also the Thing, the death mask, the
primitive scene of interpellation. It is up to us to decide, and I would never
want to cut short the discussion in the name of some norm, whether this

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 18 Structuralism : A Destitution of the Subject?

is structuralism’s grave or the question that sets in motion its indefinite

renewal, its recommencement.

Deleuze, in the article I referred to earlier, anticipated this

question, writing in his personal style that the “structuralist hero,”

neither God nor man, neither personal nor universal, [. . .] with -

out identity, made of nonpersonal individuations and preindi-
vidual singularities [. . .] assures the breakup [ l’éclatement ] of
a structure affected by excess or deficiency [. . .], opposes its own
ideal event to the ideal events that I have just described. (281)

Cut off from its immediate context, this phrase seems to me sufficiently
eloquent and sufficiently obscure to indicate, in other words, the meaning
of the question I have tried to formulate here.

étienn e bali bar is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine, and
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Paris X–Nanterre. His recent publ i-
cations include Droit de cité (Presses Universitaires de France, 2002) and Politics and the
Other Scene (Verso, 2002). A translation of his Nous, les citoyens d’Europe is forthcoming
from Princeton University Press.

james swenson teaches French at Rutgers University. He is the author of On Jean -Jacques
Rousseau Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford University
Press, 2000) and translator of books and articles by Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, and
Jacques Lacan, among others.

Notes 1 When complete, this will be the purely epistemological foun -

the fourth and final volume in
“Postwar French Thought” pub -
lished by the New Press under
the general editorship of Ramona
Nadoff.—Trans.
dation he sought, did not prevent
Serres from eventually adopting
the nationalist idea of a unicity or
absolute autonomy of the French
language [ Éloge ]).

2 See Seminar XX 138– 43, where
Fink translates lalangue as
“llanguage.”—Trans.
3 It is remarkable that one of the
most interesting “definitions”
of “structure” proposed dur -
ing this period was that of an
infinite process of translation
(which Michel Serres expressed
through the allegory of Hermes,
but which, perhaps on account of
4 The “equation” of the subject that
I have stated has probably never
been formulated in such terms, or
more precisely, it is probable that
the simplification this equation
involves (the erasure of the prob -
lems that each of its terms con-
tains) is nothing other than what
is “misunderstood” in the conflict
between structuralism and “clas-
sical” philosophies of subjectivity,
which reduce each to the nega-

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 d i f f e r e n c e s 19

tion of the other. Everything in mon thesis, I presented a series

“classicism” that makes possible
the structu ralist opening (the
“performativity” of the Cartesian
“I,” for example, or the overdeter-
mination of Kant’s “syntheses” of
ontological difference) is erased
by this misunderstanding, as is
everything in structu ralism that
renews discussions of classical
problems and, quite simply, our
reading of the history of philoso -
phy. [Note added in response to
discussion at the conference.]
5 It was recalled in the course of
the discussion that the verb “to
destitute” (destituer), to which
can be opposed in different ways
institute, restitute, or constitute,
comes from Lacan.
6 Not only rather abstract but
immediately marked by contra-
diction, since after having stated
that there is no doctri ne, no com-
of “common” characteristics.
7 The existing translation by Meek
erases the distinction by render -
ing both énoncé and énonciation
as utterance.—Trans.
8 Lacan’s formulation is actually
“a signifier is what represents
a subject to another signifier”
(“Subversion” 304).—Trans.
9 This is how I interpret the
description Lévi- Strauss gives of
the relation between “terminolo -
gies” and “attitudes” in kinship
structures (Structural Anthro -
pology 37– 40, 302– 03, 310–11),
inspired by the Saussurean the-
matics of the arbitra riness of the
sign, which in my view is much
more interesting than the specu-
lative thematics of a “structure of
structures” (the triple exchange
of women, goods, and words). See
Elementary Structures of Kinship.

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